If you have been following our blogs, you'll know that we are experimenting withuse of Agile for our Product development process & as a test are having two scrum teams each working on a release of SocialAds & JTicketing. So far the progress has been great & we have learnt a lot of things along the way.

Many of you have been participating in the feedback & testing process as well ! Thanks a lot for that. Early feedback on the Alpha's is helping us close the gap between expectations & actual development.

Our users have been requesting us for a while now to announce Roadmaps for major products so that they can plan their projects accordingly. We too believe that this would be a great idea to share our dreams about a particular product with Customers. The Techjoomla team is continuously evolving its process of product development to give our customers a better experience and satisfaction for using our extensions. In line with that we shall be releasing roadmaps for all our major extensions over the next few weeks.

The Roadmap Planning & Finalisation Cycle

As you very well know, we follow a very participative development process. Which means, that our customers get a say in how we plan things. To facilitate this, we shall initially publish a draft roadmap & users can comment on it to suggest new features, tell us which features of the planned ones should have higher priority etc.. Though we wont be able to comply with every request, we will do our best to consider these suggestions in the final roadmap for that product. Typically, a 2-4 week period shall be available for commenting on the draft roadmaps.

So put your thinking caps on & wait for the first of the road maps to come.

We have introduced Attractive new Prices for all our extensions. Prices have been slashed on many popular extensions & 12 month subscriptions are now much cheaper & easy to buy. You can see the new pricing of all prodcuts here .

It makes us feel proud and very much glad for helping Joomla Day Boston 2013, by sponsoring a mobile app for the event. The app features in covering the entire event program, speakers, Social tweets and more !!

So if you are hosting any of the Joomla Day events, then Tekdi Web Solutions and Techjoomla would definitely love to contribute for the event. How? Know here.

Hello Everyone!!

Joomla! Days are organised by local Joomla user groups to spread more knowledge about Joomla amongst the regional audiences. The event aims at providing the unique opportunity to Share, Inspire & Collaborate with Joomla users, developers, trainers and service providers along with pre and post networking, Q&A, and food !

Techjoomla & Tekdi have traditionally been highly involved in helping organising Joomla events in India. Both as sponsors as well as volunteers. Our directors Parth & Ashwin are instrumental in starting India's first JUG in Pune & organising the Joomla Days too !

Techjoomla is coming to Joomla Day India !

Techjoomla is proud to be a sponsor for Joomla Day India. And that's not it, our own J!Ticketing is powering the event booking engine of Joomla Day India and an 'event manager app' made by Techjoomla and 'apptitude' our apps is to be used for verifying tickets !

I see a lot of Jticketing Subscribers looking excited as do I ? Yup that app's coming your way soon ! More on that later .

We are proud to announce that Techjoomla "Common Payments API for Joomla" was released as free GPL code at the Joomla World conference 2012 held at San Jose this month.

This release is focussed towards all our developer friends in the community & will benefit end users as well making payment plugins available more easily & for many extensions at the same time.

Every other project executed in Joomla needs some kind of Payment integration. Techjoomla's Common Joomla Payments API evolved due to the need to reduce development time on Payment systems & also to reduce the code base & thus bugs.

This is an update for old custommers for JomGive & JomLike who have active Subscriptions at CorePHP. Techjoomla shall be

At some point over the past 18 months, you purchased either the jomGive or jomLike Joomla 1.5/1.7 extension from our friends at corePHP. Our company TechJoomla, has acquired all rights to both extensions and we will now take over all development and support of both products from August 1st 2012.

Your old account at corePHP.com will no longer display information about either purchase and you will no longer be able to receive support from corePHP for either extension. But there’s good news...

We are currently working to migrate your user accounts to our website, techjoomla.com & this process should be complete by 25th August. If you purchased jomGive or jomLike within the last 6 months, We shall be migrating over the subscription so that you can continue to get support & updates at the Techjoomla site. We will be sending you an email once the migration is complete.

Today we’re pleased to announce the acquisition of two very popular Joomla/JomSocial extensions, jomGive and jomLike, from our friends at corePHP. Effective immediately, TechJoomla will take over all development & support of both extensions and you can now purchase the brand new Joomla 2.5x-compatible versions from our store right now.

We finally have an update for you on the Advanced Search system we are building. There isnt a name finalised yet.. But we have been considering several DrillSearch, jPS (Joomla Parametric Search), jDrillDown etc.. Do suggest alternatives..

We are in early Alpha at present & our tests till now have been pretty successful. So here's what you can expect.

What All Can it Search ?

Well practically anything.. Just like Joomla's smart search is scalable to any extension by writing plugins, our extension will also allow developers to extend it by writing their own plugins to help us index their data to enable advanced search for it. As of now, we have basic plugins for Joomla content, Seblod, Zoo, JomSocial & Community Builder. These can be easily extended as needed.

Can it handle the various fields that various components have ? How can the admin control whats searchable ?

The Admin needs to create & configure a "Search Indexer" for the extensions which Advanced Search supports. The Indexer uses the extension specific plugin to build a search index that will allow us to give a nice advanced search interface for that extension on the frontend. Each indexer can be configured where you can select content types, fields etc that you want to make searchable in advanced seach.

A SocialAds like mapping interface lets you chose how to treat various fields in the Advanced search system from a choice of text, range, single or multiselect fields.Once the indexer is created, you can fill up the index by running the cron job. The Cron will also take care of keeping the index up to date.

The Frontend

A view & an Advanced search module which shows search text-box & respective parameters of each content type will be available on the frontend. Once the content type is chosen, the available search filelds for that type will be loaded via Ajax & the frontend users can do a Parametric search based on thse.

Screenshots ? Coming Soon :) :)

Joomla 2.5 with some awesome new new features—like core captcha, awesome search, the ability to link new menus with modules, a new notification system and much much more is here ! This is a Long term release which means that its going to be supported for 3 years. So if you have any sites running Joomla, its recommended that you get them up to version 2.5.

Password Security is something that you can never be too careful about. Having a weak password & not changing it periodically is one of the major concerns that site owners need to address. With Joomla sites being managed by multiple Super Admins, it can be a pain to enforce a policy on this easily.

So to make your job easier, we have released a new plugin ( already being using by several of our enterprise clients) to give your Joomla site the ability to reset passwords periodically. Note that the plugin is Joomla 1.7/2.5 compatible.

With the password reset plugin you can setup a cron job to periodically reset & email the changed passwords to all the super admins in the system. A great easy to use addon to force periodic password resets. Get it for free ! Note that you need to be logged in to download this addon. Download Password Reset for Joomla 1.7/ 2.5

JomSocial 2.4 was released recently & it comes with a slew of new features to empower your Joomla Social network.We have been working closely with the JomSocial team to ensure that all of our products work well with this new release.

How does the update affect Techjoomla Products ?

We have completed the testing of our products & are happy to report that all major extensions work flawlessly with JomSocial 2.4.So the good news is that you can upgrade without any issues.. In fact this release adds a bug fix which removes the need to hack the core JomSocial files for Integration with our Broadcast extension. All our Major extensions - SocialAds , Invitex, J!Bolo, Broadcast, J!MailAlerts & all JomSocial related plugins , Email Beautifier , People you may know, Network Suggest , Mutual Friends are fully compatible with the 2.4 release. Just make sure you download the latest versions of each.

JS Features & J!PHPlist are the extensions that are still waiting for an update for Joomla 1.7 & JomSocial 2.4. Of these the update for Featured shall be out by this month end.

Read to for whats new in JomSocial 2.4 & an awesome offer from JomSocial to get a mind blowing 25% off on your purchase !

We have just released a new plugin for SOBI Pro to add Date field Support in this awesome CCK. While working on a project, we realised that SOBI Pro does not support Date/Calendar fields so we went ahead & made this small plugin which will add this feature.

For those of you who are not aware of SOBI Pro, its a super flexible CCK system for Joomla & can cater to a lot of your requirements.You can get it here.

To use this plugin, download it & install it using the SOBI Pro Applications & it will be available as a new field type when you create a new field.You can download the extension here : SOBI Pro Date Field plugin

Hey All ! We have just arrived here at our new "Home" in the cloud at CloudAccess.net . It feels awesome & snappy fast here :) ... Thanks a ton to the Awesome team over at CloudAccess - Gary, Irfan, Chris & Saurabh for making this move super smooth & Chris Thanks for doing all the hard work man :) The site seems blazing fast to me from here atleast .. I hope your experience is the same ! Do let us know your feedback if your experience of browsing the site has improved post this move ! Now that we are back online, i am going to call it a night & catch some sleep ! Watch out for some exciting realease announcements in the coming week !

I am a old time Joomla guy working with Joomla since the mambo days. I love to promote Opensource & am an avid Linux & Joomla evangelist. With a view to be able to do what we loved best, we formed our company while still in college studying for our Mechanical Engineering degrees. Stumbling on Mambo while working on some non profit projects earlier was one of the best things that ever happened to us !

Our Company Tekdi Web Solutions was founded in 2006 ( We just celebrated our 5th Birthday !) & specializes in development on Open Source content management systems like Joomla, Drupal Wordpress , Ecommerce systems using Magento , Adobe Air Apps, Appcelerator Based Mobile & Desktop development & also builds custom apps. With a team of 25 + Developers we are always raring to go on exciting & innovative new projects !

Techjoomla was founded 2 years back in order to specifically bring focus to Joomla based Product development & channelize our ideas & our customers needs into sustainable open source products that could add value to the community. In Techjoomla we believe in doing community driven development & involve the community as much as possible in the ideation process through our Labs board where we post all our experimental work. We believe that listening to customers & love to delight them by providing high quality & innovative extensions.

You have recently released SocialAds 2.5 - can you tell us about SocialAds?

SocialAds is one of our leading products that brings a modern & intuitive Advertising management system to Joomla. Its the only Advertising management system in Joomla which offers "Social" or demographic targeting, just like facebook. With a super intuitive & easy to use "Self Service" Ad Designer, SocialAds lets advertisers create their own ads on your Joomla website , Chose what kind of targeting is needed ( Optionally also set it up to Target Guests) , Chose whether to pay Per Click, Per Impression or per day & Pay online using an array of payment methods , without the admin needing to make a single click. The admin can however optionally chose to moderate every ad for content.

The Best feature of SocialAds as our customers say is the Ad Designer. As one of our customer says, "When you look at a ad built in the designer, you just so love the look of it , that you have to buy it !". Plus SocialAds gives the power to the Advertisers. They chose the look of their ad, who sees it, how they want to pay. & even where they want the ad to be seen & on the top of it they get a Snazzy Ad Statistics Dashboard which lets them monitor the performance of their Ad. SocialAds increases advertising ROI by a huge amount.

With SocialAds, we have tried to lower the entry barrier for advertisers by allowing anyone to advertise without having to create any kind of Special Advertising Accounts. Whats more, we also have something called promotion plugins, to make it super easy to Advertise something you already have on the site.. Say like a SOBI entry or JomSocial Groups.

With Version 2.5, SocialAds is not "Necessarily Social" . What it means is that it can also be used on Websites that do not have Social extensions like CB or Community Builder. Plus 2.5 introduces a lot of features traditionally expected of a Enterprise level Advertising system, without losing out on the simplicity of use that makes SocialAds so popular. We now have Zone Management, Ad Layouts, Zone based Pricing to let site owners charge more for premium spaces, Coupon management for promotions & over 100 + other small features, bug fixes & improvements !

SocialAds has something for Developers too ! Now SocialAds supports various plugin types to extend SocialAds in some amazing ways. Adding more payment plugins, Adding more ad layouts whats more with the next version, you will be able to write targeting plugins too in order to extend SocialAds targeting capacities.

Many of your extensions are well integrated with Jomsocial and Community builder - is it hard to update and adjust your own extension in order to work with latest version of a third-party?

Well only if the 3rd party doesnt provide a robust API & plugin architecture ! But with CB & JomSocial, these guys are really great. Both of them have a super API with excellent documentation. The guys at JomSocial are always willing to listen If we want some new plugin event. In the end its really about collaboration. Its great to be able together with this amazing community of developers that makes Joomla so powerful.. which i guess takes us to your next question !

Why did you choose to develop for Joomla?

Joomla is an excellent CMS or Development platform & is backed by a great User as well as developer community. We had been working with Mambo/Joomla for almost 4 years .. & have kind of developed a expertise in it & also have a good sense of the communities needs. Finally its very much fun & a great learning experience to grow with & collaborate with the great Joomla developer community.

What will we see from TechJoomla during this year (any new extensions, features etc)?

We have quite a lot coming up ! There is Broadcast which is a Social Stream sync extension for JomSocial which allows you to integrate JomSocial's activity stream with Facebook, LinkedIn & twitter & also allow uses to post updates to all these networks from your site. Its sparked quite some interest & will help sites achieve tighter facebook integration.

Then we have a full rewrite of JBolo coming with ver 3.0 which will happen in late June which promises to get rid of Javascript conflict type issues & add a great performance improvement. With SocialAds , we have Keyword targeting( Contextual), Geolocation targeting & another Major development related to the same in in the works, but we are keeping it under wraps for the moment ;) . With Invitex, we have a concept called "Invite Anwhere" coming up which will allow you to use Invitex to invite for anything.. just like you can integrate a commenting system with any content !

Its a great pleasure to announce that 6 more of our extensions are now Joomla 1.6 compatible ! Joining the 1.6 native extensions are Network Suggest, People You May Know & Mutual Friends for both CB & JomSocial. Note that in case of JomSocial , all these extensions are also JomSocial 2.2 compatible. Besides the 1.6 compatibility, we have also included quite a lot of Bug fixes & some feature additions in all the extensions. For the full changelog, please click on read more. Users with active subscriptions shall be able to download the extensions in the My Subscriptions area.

With these releases, now the major extensions that are still in development for Joomla 1.6 compatibility are J!Bolo, SocialAds & J!MailAlerts. Of these you can expect SocialAds & J!MailAlerts to be out by end of next week, while J!Bolo will take more time as its undergoing a full rewrite. Stay tuned for more updates !

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